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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 108
New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 108 (and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday).
EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.
EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (352)
This chapter may sort out something which got on my nerves earlier in the story-- the long sequence where Quirrell is Harry's only friend. I'm not saying that Harry should have known Quirrell was Voldemort (and I still think it might have been more interesting if Quirrell had been seriously bad news, but not Voldemort), but it seems to me that Harry liked and trusted Quirrell more than he should have. (Sorry, no details-- I'm going by memory.)
Now I think that Harry's desperate desire for an intellectual equal (which to some extent translates as someone who agrees with Harry on important issues) is somewhat a result of him being a Quirrell imprint.
I'm not clear on what being a Quirrell imprint means-- he doesn't have Quirrell's memories. He does have Quirrell's intelligence, and part of his temperament. It's interesting that a kind upbringing can have such a large effect, but I'm not sure this makes sense-- why wouldn't more of Quirrell's misanthropy have carried over?
Also, is it as plausible that death is really bad in the HPMOR universe as it is in ours? It might be true, but is it obviously true? The rules are really different with magic, and minds are much more important than in a universe where it's plausible that there's nothing but matter/energy.
Eh. I never got the sense that Harry was that good in near mode. Consider him not seeing a reason for Ron to exist, his total lack of interest in Hagrid, the incident in Diagon Alley, "birth parents," and the list goes on and on--but the difference is that while Quirrell is perfectly willing to jump from "I don't see a reason for Ron to exist" to "I can kill Ron if I feel like it," Harry has been taught that's not how the Right People think about things. But does he value Ron, or see a reason for him to exist or be happy? Not really, nowhere near like Hermione does.
I always found it extremely plausible. Harry has had an isolated childhood, by his own admission, lacking in friends, in intellectual equals, in people who would take him seriously. Quirrell is the first person he's met who thinks like him and is better at it and who gives out approval but in a sparse fashion. So we have a kindred spirit and a role model to admire (intellectually if not ethically) and a parental figure to dispense the sort of validation Harry can't get anywhere else. Quirrell pretty much ticks all the boxes for Harry, in a way no one else does. If Quirrell was actively trying to brainwash Harry, he could hardly have set up better conditions.
Quirrell doesn't hate people so much as he has given up trying to care about them after being bewildered and frustrated by their flaws. His Killing Curse is powered by indifference, not hate. Harry's scientific background makes it easier for him to understand why people are flawed in the ways they are, and it gives him hope that they can be improved, which is something Quirrell never had.
One has to wonder about the "masters" of the Horcruxes Are the two Tom Riddles masters of their individual Horcruxes, or are they joint masters to both? In HPMOR, time turners are locked to a single individual. Then can Voldemort use Harry's time turner? My guess will be "no" for literary reasons.
Voldemort mastered the resurrection stone by defeating death. For Harry to master it, he would have to defeat death, either through Patronus or by dying and getting resurrected.
Harry has already mastered another Deathly Hallow, and there's no reason to believe that the requirements for different Hallows are different based on what we've seen.
Indeed. And how did the Ministry even key the time-turner to Harry? He wasn't physically present and "magic" seems to think his name is Tom Riddle.
You could ask the same question of the Hogwarts letter.
The simplest explanation seems to be that the Marauders' Map is keying off of something different than the other person-specific magic we know about. Perhaps the Ministry's running something like a magical Social Security database that associates names with bodies at birth, and the Map (and, by extension, the Hogwarts security system) is taking MD5 hashes of people's souls and associating them with names on admission.
Which raises the interesting question of whether Harry counts as a professor where the wards are concerned.
And given that MD5 is broken that could lead to interesting consequences... :-D
Well, that's a collision attack; I don't think we've seen a way to create an arbitrary pair of souls, and if we had it'd probably be obvious on their admission. Though I'd read the story of someone breaking preimage resistance on the Hogwarts wards and using that to, say, get a toad credentialed as the Muggle Studies professor. It'd probably do a better job...
...actually, I kind of want to write that now.
Harry and Quirrell are about to enter the room containing the Mirror of Erised (desire), which shows the viewer's deepest desire. It contains the philosopher's stone, and (Ch. 104)
So, what is Harry's deepest desire? There are several candidates, but I think a strong contender is a Quirrell who isn't evil. Transfiguration can only create things that already exist. It is plausible that being seen in the mirror, modified as it is by the magic of the Stone, counts as existence for this purpose. So, Harry's win condition is: transfigure Quirrell into redeemed Quirrell. Due to the destructive interaction of their magics, this would require disabling Quirrell and then getting someone else to do the transfiguration.
That's his (currently strongest) instrumental desire. What is his terminal desire? Something about humanity conquering death and reaching towards stars perhaps...
Question is, which desire does the mirror show?
Perhaps neither. Canon Harry originally saw himself surrounded by a family, a desire which was both obviously unfulfillable and outside Harry's known range of explicit wishes (we know he wishes his parents were still alive, but the mirror showed a more extended family of whom Harry had never thought as far as we know).
For more direct relevance, Ron saw himself being popular and successful (terminal desire) but at the end of the book Harry saw himself finding the Stone (instrumental desire).
Quirrel has not confiscated Harry's ring with his father rock, which has been transfigured by Harry, in the setting. We've seen Quirrel's magic fluctuate out of control when touching Harry's, both in Azkaban and in his telling of the night at Godric's Hollow. We've seen Quirrel take care in the Azkaban escape to not even let Harry touch something that Quirrel has transfigured.
It is possible, if Harry simply touches Quirrel with the gem on his ring that Quirrel will be forced to once again throw away his wand and transform into a snake. It would affect Harry too, but Harry seemed less affected than Quirrel in Azkaban for whatever reason (because magic is stronger around Quirrel?)
Even if this avenue would destroy Harry, self-sacrifice is among my contenders for a "power the Dark Lord knows not".
There is also the "other" transfiguration, the one that's not the ring. Anyone have guesses as to what this is?
It's the ring itself (as opposed to the gem on the ring). That's how it was able to escape detection in Chapter 92.
Not the ring. Ch. 105:
solipsist pointed out in the ch.109 thread that Harry's glasses are a good candidate.
QQ has Harry's wand, so how is Harry going to get out of this mess? One of my theories is wandlessmagic. The existence of wandless magic at all is evidence the wand isn't strictly needed.
This makes sense if you buy that a wizard is pulling levers on the source of magic rather than actually enacting the spell
From Chapter 25
Since wandless magic exists, we know that you can push those buttons without a wand. You can make the source of magic do what you want without a wand. Harry has been told that wandless magic is harder or that it requires more power, or various other excuses for it not to be taught until later. But, I suspect that is just a conceptual limitation, that you don't actually need the power to do it. My evidence for this is the accidental magic that children use when stressed. Under stress children can perform magics that seem extremely powerful (well over the power level of kids their age) and they can do it without wands.
from chapter 13
Now in this case, we know that it wasn't accidental magic. But Sprout, a Hogwarts professor and presumably an expert in dealing with wizard children thinks this is perfectly plausible. She thinks Harry could create, not just transfigure, but <i>create</i> two pies ex nihilo and then levitate them at high speeds towards a bully. (brief aside consider the amount of energy in two pies)
in chapter78
We've been told elsewhere that disillusioning is very high powered magic. After the dementor incident, QQ notes, that Snape is probably powerful enough to disillusion himself. From context, this is notable and its assumed that many adult wizards are not able to do it. But the above quote from 78 says that children CAN do this if they have the right frame of mind.
"Accidental" magic gives children a way to press the buttons on the source of magic without wands, incantations or movements, and it gives them a way to press the buttons for spells that are otherwise far above their power level. If Harry promotes this problem / subject to his attention, then he may discover a way to deliberately use "accidental" magic. And once he had that, he would have a vast toolkit at his disposal.
Moreover, it ignores Merlin's interdict. Those children had not learned how to disillusion themselves.
I think you're on to something here.
Merlin's Interdict is unrelated to wands. It simply prevents certain magical knowledge from being passed down in any way other than through oral instruction. It doesn't prevent spontaneous rediscovery of that magical knowledge; the magic was there waiting to be discovered.
Hmm... some thoughts occur to me:
Firstly, he hasn't used any of the muggle equipment Fred and George got him yet has he? But Quirrell's got his pouch.
Secondly, this may not come as a surprise but he is likely to succeed since "HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL DESTROY THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN" this could refer to Quirell, true, but I far expect it to refer to HJPEV due to the timing. Also note that Quirell says something about prophecies in ch. 108, but I can't find the quote.
Third: obligatory wacky theory that his father's rock is the Stone of Permanency. Stones == rocks, and he was given it by Dumbledore after all. And Harry's magic interferes with Quirrell's so it might shield the magic trace.
Fourthly: this is my first post on LessWrong, nice to meetcha!
I've been wondering about this. Voldemort knows this prophecy, and I expect he realises it's not about him. So, how can he expect to be able to kill Harry, in a self-consistent universe?
Perhaps Harry's reading of that plan is all wrong.
Actually, I'm no longer that sure about this. Does anyone have a source for prophecies being unavoidable? They certainly seem to have a knack of getting themselves fulfilled (see October 31st) but are they literally unbreakable?
If Quirrell thinks that he can prevent a prophecy from coming true, he's committed this time around to do it properly and not to try to creatively fulfil it. He doesn't appear to think this is futile.
I just realizied that the trap for voldie might well be Baba Yaga's hairbrush.
It follows from the curse on the defense position.
Because I just realized that I think it was an accident, and happened because Voldemort moved the goblet of fire out of Baba Yaga's reach.
Theory: Voldemort is wrong about the Baba Yaga. She faked her death and ran off with her new wife. This part I am quite confident about. 70% probability? Most of the remainder is that her death was accidental and the reason Perenelle has spent centuries accumulating lore is that she wants her back. Yes, Im assigning under 10% likelyhood to the chance that Voldemort read this story right.
Anyway, given "Baba Yaga is not dead". A thought occurred to me. "Did they remember to terminate her employment? Could they in fact even do so without being whammied by the goblet?" The answers to which is obviously "No." Unfortunately worded contract is unfortunate, Baba Yaga has magical tenure despite slacking on her job for going on 6 centuries.
This was all well and good as long as the goblet was somewhere Baba could get at it. - Telling the goblet to lay of a new teacher every couple of decades isn't much of an imposition. But then Voldemort stole the darn thing! and it has been striking down everyone that looked to move from the status of "Temp" to actually taking over her job. Because the job is hers.
.. This also implies she is still keyed into the wards. And still unable to harm any student of hogwarts. If that holds for graduates too, it neatly explains why she never directly opposes most dark lords - they are hogwarts graduates, and would invoke the contract if she fought them.
Baba Yaga owns the stone. Voldemort was a student in Hogwarts.
Voldemort taking the stone could mean that the Goblet sees Voldemort as violating the agreement and the Goblet goes and kills Voldemort.
Tom Riddle was not a student when Baba Yaga taught, and would not have been part of that pact.
I'm not sure that matters. The Goblet might be open for contracts that cover the student body together.
It seems like a brilliant plan to prevent anyone from stealing your stone from the perspective of Baba Yaga wanting to turn a good wizard. It seems like a brilliant plan to lay a trap for Voldemort that way.
There simply enough narrativium that I would expect the story to go down that road.
Doesn't the fact that the wards record the troll (and therefore probably Quirill too) as the Defence Professor falsify this?
After thinking about this on a more meta-level... I'm coming around to this idea. My primary objection is still that is seems too complicated and, well, somewhat absurd.
However, I just checked and I don't think Baba Yaga is a canon character at ALL. I can't even find a source for the "undying Baba Yaga" (although I didn't look that hard). This does point to some kind of importance. Why would EY dedicate so much of ch.108 to this if it's just backstory?
So... updating in favour of Baba Yaga being an important plot point to more like 85%. That QQ got some of his story wrong is lower (naturally), more like 60%. The whole complicated edifice you bring up is still quite low I think.
Does anyone else think this reads like Quirrel has an awful lot of emotional connection to and personal memories about this story, almost as if it were Baba Yaga speaking about herself in the 3rd person? Could Riddle or Quirrel have come across a Baba Yaga horcrux? The resurrection stone, perhaps? Earlier than that? Why would Perenelle share these secrets? How would anyone know these details if Baba Yaga was dead and Perenelle had not shared them? No one else would have been present for those private moments.
And what are the odds that a Dark Lady like Baba Yaga did not have a horcrux?
In Ch. 70 Quirrel makes a point during the S.P.H.E.W. confrontation with the headmaster that Dark Ladies are also underrepresented, and that few could name one except Baba Yaga. Self-reference?
She would probably need to be faking the map labelling her (and Harry?) as Tom Riddle, but a sorceress as powerful as Baba Yaga combined with the secrets of Salazar, who created the Hogwarts security system in the first place, could probably accomplish that.
Notice what Quirrel does and doesn't say in parseltongue:
If you want text to run with this idea, that text would be:
(Chapter 17)
and
(Chapter 108)
...and if you want a counter-hypothesis, the only line quoted in which Quirrell seems to have an emotional reaction is:
Dumbledore did not allow Tom Riddle to teach Battle Magic.
That could explain the anger. There's still a lot of detail about the bedroom, though you could assume that Quirrel used legilemens on Flamel to find the truth about the stone. That seems really direct and dangerous, but Perenelle may not be an occlumens at all, and from Ch. 86:
As DavidAgain pointed out above, there seems to be a parseltongue statement against tricking the map as well.
Something is still off about this, though. Suddenly Quirrel is spinning a romance narrative? Also, here is a clever, ambition student, who in her 6th year outwitted the most powerful dark sorceress we know of and obtained for herself an ancient immortality-granting artifact. She sought immortality while still in school, as Tom Riddle did, and with greater success. She leveraged her advantage over greater wizards than herself to obtain more power still. She has shown so many traits that Quirrel would admire, and what adjectives does he use to describe her? Covetous. Black-hearted. If the betrayal were personal, I can make sense of that, otherwise it seems really off.
The Quirrel I know would mostly stick to the facts, perhaps stopping to note the stupidity of Baba Yaga and the cunning of Perenelle.
Maybe his negative view of Perenelle is just because she helped Dumbledore. Maybe I'm reading too much into too little. I'm in love with the theory though; I hope it works out.
My head canon is that Riddle seduced his own DADA professor when he was a 6th year, so when he investigated Baba Yaga's death that narrative rang true to him.
In chapter 25 the Weasley twins discuss the map
I now think this refers to warm!Harry showing up as HJPEV and his dark side as Tom M. Riddle. If so, it's less probable the map is being manipulated.
Eliezer says on r/hpmor that the intermittent map "error" is V's intermittent control of Q's body.
Harry can go months without using his dark side. Quirrel on the other hand goes into zombie mode every day. Perhaps zombie mode is what's left of the original Quirrel.
My prediction is that zombie mode is Quirrel checking up on Horcruxes in the same way he views the stars.
This makes some sense, but if Quirrell could bamboozle the map, surely he wouldn't do so in such a way as to reveal vitally important and damaging secrets to his enemies.
I love this idea in general: but don't see how he could have faked the map, given:
"Did you tamper with thiss map to achieve thiss ressult, or did it appear before you by ssurprisse?"
"Wass ssurprisse," replied Professor Quirrell, with an overtone of hissing laughter. "No trickss."
I think this is the most important evidence against it. You could parse Quirrel as saying that Harry being Tom Riddle on the map is a surprise and no a trick, and that he is not commenting on himself being Tom Riddle instead of Baba Yaga.
You could also assume that Quirrel is lying about parseltongue. But yeah, I think that drops the probability a lot.
I decided to collect the stuff about these recent updates that confuse me, and when added together two were in the shape of a theory!
Even Quirrell is confused! Wow!
So... Dumbledore did know all along, just like cannon, and sent the map to the twins for plausible deniability. He can get away with that because he doesn't mind when people think him a fool. And he really needs Querrellmort to think of him as ignorant so he will play the role perfectly... well Voldemort said he could play chess.
In the last thread roystgnr wrote
That is totally something I wouldn't have figured out on my own. Well, the first part. I had just put that up to Harry not wanting to see ill of his friend, but magical obfuscation makes sense too. Oh, but someone else had the knowledge if the first theory is right. Someone who used Legilimancy on Harry in chapter 19 and that's just when Harry found out about it!
That's mixes well with the idea that the Goblet of Fire kills Voldemort if he takes the stone. It's simply a well set up trap and because Voldemort thinks he's smarter than the rest he walks into it.
Is this the same Asian combat instructor mentioned earlier, I wonder?
I vote no on this theory. "All the good martial artists live" in Asia, so that may be the reason this combat instructor was said to be Asian, but if he was trying to get a random Muggle in, (1) Quirrellmort would have said "Muggle instructor", and (2) there would have been more legitimate resistance than just a smugly smiling clerk.
Yes. Riddle received this training as Monroe, most likely, and then threw his temper tantrum as Voldemort to make sure no one else could get it.
Old jokes from chapter 79:
And also
He's Mr. You-Know-Who.
In Ch. 37, Quirrell explains how he found Harry:
Conditioned on Lord Voldmort being a blood purist, this is evidence for Quirrell not being Voldemort (probably the intended interpretation). In fact, this was evidence for Lord Voldemort not being a blood purist.
And if you've been paying attention to the Muggle world for the whole 20th century, a blood purist is exactly the sort of villain you'd think up.
Prediction on destroying the Horcux network: we know that the Horcruxes are all connected to Voldemort. If you could locate one (and we know they are now distributed so anyone can stumble across and be possessed by them), perhaps you could use that Horcruxes's connection to the network to destroy or incapacitate it, then kill Voldemort. Locating all possible nodes to physically destroy is heavily implied to be infeasible even with magic. I give this 60% confidence.
Prediction on next chapter: Voldemort kills Harry and succeeds. After all, Harry just told Voldemort about giving Horcruxes to your friends and testing your Horcrux network. I imagine Voldemort is curious as to whether or not Harry, as a Tom Riddle, will be absorbed by the network. I give this 40% confidence.
Outcomes: A. Only the part of Harry that Voldemort imprinted is absorbed by the network. This consciousness is either reborn as a purely young Tom Riddle, or reabsorbed by Voldemort completely upon his next death.
B. Harry himself is absorbed into the network. I'm not sure about all the implications of this. Obviously, he could attempt possessing someone, but this seems mostly against his moral code (unless he thought he could prevent more suffering by doing so.) Or he could potentially mess with the Horcux network internally.
C. Another magical explosion occurs--we're still not entirely certain what caused Voldemort's Horcrux spell to backfire in the first place.
D. Harry, in fact, dies. A possible, if unsatisfying literary ending.
I recall Quirrell saying that his spirit could fly free and choose a consenting person to possess if he so desired. Perhaps Lesath would let Harry borrow his body for a while?
"My life is yours, my Lord, and my death as well."
I like this.
So, why did Quirrell offer Hermione to leave before killing her?
That's a good question. Quirrel said:
Killing her allowed Harry to put the dilemma to Lucius Malfoy, that either Lucius had killed her, or some other enemy was behind both her death and the attack on Draco. And that led to Lucius returning Harry's money and renouncing the accusation that Hermione, sworn to the House of Potter, had attacked Draco.
If she left, none of that would have happened.
It seems to be a character trait that he tries to allow opponents a way out if they're smart enough: a chance to lose, if you will. He offered Harry's mother a deal rather than simply killing her, he offered Skeeter a chance to make amends before killing her, he offers the Auror a stun or an AK, he offered the master a chance to teach him rather than die - and he offered Hermione a chance to stop being the heroine opposed to the dark lord.
In each instance, the character chose... poorly.
I agree.
That one was a trick though. He never intended to kill Harry, just to cast a Horcrux 1.0 on him, which needs a murder to activate. That's why he was amused when he offered 'yourself to die, and the child to live' - because it was his plan to kill her and leave Harry alive anyway.
I'm not sure it was such a trick. She could have killed herself, or she could have surprised him such that he was not prepared to use her death to turn Harry into a Horcrux, in which case, frustrated of his primary goal, he would have settled for AKing the baby to try to block the prophecy more normally. Both parties prefer a binding deal in which the mother dies and the infant survives.
There was no possible reason for her to kill herself. And if he couldn't use her death, he would have taken Harry and gone on to murder the first convenient person he encountered to make the horcrux, delaying him by a few hours at most.
Since Snape had begged Voldemort not to kill Lily, he was going to let her live ("move aside, foolish woman!"), and taken the trouble to hunt down someone else to kill for the horcrux. But since she offered herself to die, he agreed, and was amused.
'No possible reason'? Here's 4 off the top of my head. She could kill herself to avoid being tortured to insanity & then death. That's always a good reason. She could kill herself to frustrate Voldemort and deprive him of the satisfaction of killing her himself (also a classic, dating back at least to Masada). She could kill herself after he offers the deal, reasoning that even if you don't understand why, it's a good policy to try to prevent whatever your enemy wants. She could kill herself as part of a nasty ritual or black magic.
When does Voldemort ever linger at the scene of a crime for multiple hours? I'm fairly sure that would violate some Rule or other. No, simpler if the plan fails to fallback to killing Harry directly and making a timely retreat as a dark lord should.
So, if this were Pact, I would expect that Dumbledore has one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, and he can be possessed by Voldemort at will. Dumbledore would show up to save the day, and then the brief uptick in probability of success would be followed by a precipitous drop.
I am fairly confident this will not happen, but I'm noticing that most of my confidence seems to come from arguments that I am not confident in once I give them explicit form. For example, that seems too hard an antagonist for Harry, and he needs to have some chance of success, and EY seems against giving the protagonist the plot armor* that Wildbow gives them. But when I observe that this is an outside view argument that's reference class specific, HPMoR seems much closer to Worm or Pact than to other works of fiction, which says I should expect it to follow the same convention. Thoughts?
* Typically, Wildbow protagonists look like they're taking two steps back for every one step forward, but I see it more as "trading away parts of themselves / resources for success, and eventually getting to the end goal / end of the story." If you predict that they will eventually win but it will be the most Pyrrhic victory possible (over the long haul), I think you have a good shot at getting all the details right.
Riddle no longer needs the target to touch a horcrux, and Dumbledore is too powerful to possess.
ETA: gjm is right: Voldemort himself says the target must be either willing or too weak to resist him. So Voldemort can't possess most random people, and certainly not Dumbledore.
If Voldemort could possess Dumbledore, he could have done so earlier and simply given himself the Stone, as well as the Elder Wand and any other interesting gadgets Dumbledore has. He'd have made Dumbledore teach him all the spells he knows, too, if those survive possession. And he'd have used Dumbledore to attack by surprise Flamel or anyone else if he wanted to.
In the least convenient world, possessing someone doesn't give Voldemort access to any of their previous memories or spells, it just wipes the mind and takes over the body. Then it might be hard to possess Dumbledore and use him to get the Stone. But he could still take out Dumbledore, cause Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts, and then possess Flamel while he has the Stone.
Possessing anyone in the world (or at least, any wizard other than Harry) just by making them touch any object you prepared beforehand is so overpowered that if it's true, the only possible reason Quirrel is still plotting anything or playing games or appearing to ever be in danger, is that he'd be bored otherwise.
If Voldemort can possess Dumbledore at will and chooses not to, the only reason I can think of is that it would make the game too boring, like he said about the Wizarding War. This strikes me as... inadequate. With the Stone involved, Voldermort is playing for real stakes, and waiting for the end of the year increases the chance something will go wrong, weakens the Quirrel body, and eventually forces Voldemort to operate on the last day of the school year, when others might guess something important would happen.
(Edited:) But why wouldn't Voldemort be able to possess Dumbledore, or anyone else in the world, other than Harry? He claims the only requirement is to have the target touch a Horcrux 2.0. This seems fairly easy: to give make sure your target will touch a Horcruxed coin, you can just toss them one and they will catch it by reflex, as an earlier chapter pointed out. And you can horcrux the doorknob of their office, a chair they'll sit on in a public park, etc. It may be, however, that since Voldemort has only had this ability for a few months, during which Dumbledore has been on high alert, he hasn't been able to accomplish this yet.
No. They must either consent or be too weak to resist. It seems unlikely that either Dumbledore or Flamel would meet either condition.
I just realized Voldemort probably cast the revised Horcrux on Roger Bacon's diary with wordless magic:
[...]
http://hpmor.com/chapter/26
Or he could have just cast the spell at any other time of his choosing prior to giving Harry the diary. For that matter, he could have not done it at all, since there's no actual benefit to making the diary a Horcrux - he already has all the Horcruxes he needs, and it's not like he can possess Harry anyway.
Turns out I was quite wrong anyway.
More questions. I'll just gather them here, instead of making a new comment for each one.
1) Making horcruxes for your friends doesn't actually test the horcrux spell, you also have to kill your friends. So it makes more sense to test on a minion, which doesn't require you to be nice in the first place. Why didn't Quirrell think of that?
2) Why did Quirrell offer Hermione to leave before killing her? The plot against Malfoy wouldn't be served by her departure, only by her death.
3) If magical resonance can kill, why didn't it kill or otherwise affect baby Harry?
4) If Quirrell's problem is that he's bored and doesn't see the fun in anything, why didn't he solve that problem long ago by using mind magic on himself?
5) In Ch. 107, why not just call mind-controlled Snape and ask him to explain what's up with his room? Eliezer has said that wouldn't work because Snape is a perfect Occlumens, but Quirrell don't need to read Snape's mind, just threaten him and demand the truth.
6) Why kill Hermione to plot against Lucius? What's so difficult about killing Lucius to begin with?
Edited to add:
7) If Riddle wished for magical Britain to become more competent, why did he kill Yermy Wibble?
(1). What did you think about my argument here? That Quirrel couldn't think of a plan that started by teaching his most powerful and secret magic to a minion.
(3). Maybe the backlash is proportional to the strength of one's magic, so in Azkaban Quirrel was affected a lot more than Harry, and baby Harry wasn't affected at all. That matches the fact that Quirrel's new strategy for surviving such moments is to stop using magic, throw away his wand and abandon the very shape of a wizard.
(5). If he tortured or threatened Snape, he couldn't trust anything Snape might say. A perfect Occlumens is perfectly prepared to assume a false identity that will confess false information.
(6). Back then, Quirrel wanted to strengthen Harry politically and eventually help him rule Britain. If he killed Lucius, Draco would blame Dumbledore, be very angry and afraid, and probably leave Hogwarts. If he caused Lucius to be disgraced, he might succeed in making Draco believe that Lucius had indeed killed Hermione, and then Draco would come back to Hogwarts and become even closer friends with Harry.
Baby Harry did at least get a scar.
Eliezer and I are now part of the literary canon.
At least, we're both taught in the English department at Princeton. Anne Jamison's course, "Fanfiction: Transformative works from Shakespeare to Sherlock", will cover Eliezer's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on March 2, and one of my short stories, "The Magician and the Detective", on March 4.
What the hell? Making horcruxes for your friends doesn't actually test the invention. You also need to kill your friends and hope that the invention works. That doesn't sound so nice, does it? And we don't have a good explanation why Riddle missed this idea anymore.
I don't think Harry meant to imply that actually running this test would be nice, but rather that one cannot even think of running this test without first thinking of the possibility of making a horcrux for someone else (something which is more-or-less nice-ish in itself, the amorality inherent in creating a horcrux at all notwithstanding).
I wonder why EY chose to use this example. It seems that a big reason he writes the book is to promote rationality and goodness. This seems like a huge opportunity to make the point that "the otherwise smart dark wizard is missing out by not being good". But the point is much less clear because of the fact that actually running the test wouldn't really be that nice.
You don't have to test it on your friends; you can test it on your enemies, or on bystanders you don't care about, or in Voldemort's case, on minions you don't care about.
Get a random wizard off the street (if you're Voldemort) or a prisoner you're going to kill anyway (if you're ethical). Control them by Imperius, Legilimizing, or plain threats. Have them make a Horcrux. Kill them and activate the horcrux on a second person you're willing to kill. Test the result. When done, kill the second person and destroy the Horcrux.
Yeah, that's why I said "we don't have a good explanation why Riddle missed this idea anymore".
Harry thinks it's because making a Horcrux for someone else pattern-matches "teaching your most powerful spells to others", which pattern-matches "helping others altruistically", and Voldemort has an ugh field around that concept, or at least a blind spot. For what it's worth, Voldemort agreed with this analysis.
Make them for lots of friends, friends who like you lead dangerous lives and who unlike you are not vastly more powerful than every other wizard around. Some of them will likely die soon enough.
You just need a friend who would otherwise die soon, so that the risk of permanent death is worth eternal life.
What did he do with it once he stole it?
Became the Defense Professor at Hogwarts without any fear of being required to make a binding promise with the Goblet of Fire. He's making sure history doesn't repeat itself.
Made it into a Horcrux, obviously :)
... Hm.
This isn't the chain of logic I followed - for the sake of authenticity I'll put that at the end, but -
Isn't a little... strange, that artifacts designed and destined to defeat death transfer primarily by death?
I mean, even aside from the "kill the previous owner and take their stuff" method, the other option - inheriting it - is also heavily tied to death, as powerful artifacts like these are unlikely to be permanently given away until the original owner has no further use of it.
Backing away from plot for a minute - if you don't expect to manage to destroy death yourself, you should really program your powerful artifacts to seek out the most effective owners, anyway. Inheritance is very unreliable, and murder is entirely counterproductive - both would be backup selectors to anyone designing such a thing. So what's the primary determinant?
I think we've seen it. The prophecy stone, that responded to Harry's oath to end death, engraved with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, and completely unmentioned since - if I were going to design such a thing, gifting the Hallows to someone who had sworn an honest oath against death would be a good start, particularly if I could somehow tie it into True Patronus capability (as the silvery light suggests.)
If that's the case, then Harry has a stronger claim on the Hallows than their current physical possessors. Most importantly, this includes the Resurrection Stone. Further, magic seems to register HJPEV as "Tom Riddle" - at any rate, the ancient Hogwarts wards do. So unless magic has multiple names for Harry Potter, then HJPEV may really count as the same person as Voldemort - in which case he would have access to his Horcrux network. Voldemort may even have anticipated this - but since literally nobody knows both the existence and the significance of that glowing stone, he can't anticipate losing control over the Stone.
So, predictions:
Harry is the Master of Death, in the sense of being the primary magical owner of all three Hallows - 75%.
HJPEV counts as Tom Riddle, to the point that on death, the Horcrux network will attempt to update based on him. - 60%.
Links go to PredictionBook pages.
(My actual chain of logic started from noticing that I was confused about the Death prophecy - since I didn't really see how the Hallows would play much of a part in the climax of the story - which lead to the realization that the prophecy might reassign ownership of the Hallows.)
I think you're right; on reflection, that's exactly the sort of thing I would expect rational!Peverells to do, plus the stone appears about the right age to be set up by the Peverells. Based on the same reflection, I agree with your predictions and the probabilities you've given them. Quoting for posterity:
And I'll just make this my prediction comment for this thread. (Previous prediction comment.)
The prophecy stone in Chapter 96 ("the tall stone worn as though from a thousand years of age, upon it a line within a circle within a triangle glowing ever so faintly silver") and/or its behavior will become plot-relevant. 95% Otherwise it’s a major unfired Chekhov’s Gun.
The wand Quirrell produced from a false tooth in Chapter 107 (the one that he then uses to cast Fiendfyre) is the brother to Harry’s wand. 90%
Riddle’s Horcrux 2.0 (the improved version that resembles the 'false' description, but before he integrated the Resurrection Stone) is actually a lost earlier version of the Horcrux spell; Riddle rediscovered it. 70%
Observations:
This whole segment from Chapter 108 reminds me strongly of having something to protect:
How odd. You think the Order would've mentioned that Riddle and Monroe were in the same year at school.
Hmm. My probability that Hermione will be recreated as an alicorn princess is now over 75%:
It seems unlikely that Voldemort thinks that humans are the optimal creatures to be (that's flowing with the status quo, which he does not do). It might be best to be, say, both a Wizard and a Troll, or a Wizard and a Dragon, or a Wizard and some new optimized thing. But why try this out on himself first, when it could go horribly wrong, when he could try it out on Hermione?
Dumbeldore wouldn't like Hermione coming back from the dead. It's unnatural. He previously worried that the only reason Voldemort would steal Hermione's body is to make an inferius.
So he would reinstate her in a pony form, suited for friendship, and optimizing-oriented? Watch out, Hanna.
A thought occurs: how do we know the Stone is actually at the end of the gauntlet? Is there anything to keep Dumbledore from setting up the traps as a decoy to flush out Voldemort while the real stone is elsewhere (and presumably under proper security)?
The Stone is probably there because Quirrel covered how he led Flamel to believe the Stone had to be actually in the trap before it would work; ch108:
But Voldemort doesn't actually have a way of finding the Stone. So given that the rooms meant for students don't actually protect the Stone from Voldemort, Dumbledore could have created several similar final-rooms, equally protected, and placed the rooms meant for students in front of one of the wrong ones.
And if Dumbledore has any way of protecting the Stone inside Hogwarts that's better than placing it in a usually-unguarded room fool of traps and spells, then he would have used it, but still created the room full of traps and spells as a decoy.
As long as Dumbledore isn't completely certain Voldemort can in fact find the Stone, this would be a smart thing to do. Voldemort bluffed Flamel, who (as portrayed by Voldemort) isn't really smart, but Dumbledore may not be fully convinced. (He's been trying to convince Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts.)
Then he would expect Voldemort, using something like a map or scrying or just being clever, to know that the student rooms weren't the real trap and so those are a waste of effort.
But how would Voldemort know the other rooms even existed, or where they were in Hogwarts (before he acquired the Map)?
He knows about these rooms because Dumbledore deliberately drew the whole school's attention to them, and when Voldemort tried looking in, he saw very powerful spells guarding them. That sounds exactly like a trap to me. And a trap is something you set even if you anticipate a low chance of success.
The one reason so far to believe these are the right rooms (though I am not fully convinced) is that Snape was guarding them.
He would know - if you were Dumbledore/Flamel, with a healthy respect for the devious mind of the greatest dark wizard ever, who has a particular gift for finding out secrets, making a mockery of his foes' plans, and generally being a complete pain in the ass - because he did incredibly Dark magic to defeat your hiding of the rooms. Since you believe he knows where the Stone is, thanks to the Crown, he'll be able to focus his efforts in looking for secrets and traps around the Stone.
Or Dumbledore can be carrying the Stone on his own person all the time, because even though Flamel insisted it be in Hogwarts, 1) the strongest protection the castle can offer is an 'adult wizard', in Quirrell's terminology, 2) it is inconsistent with Dumbledor's morals to set up a scenario in which a student can actually die, no matter how possessed, 3) canon!Dumbledore said once that he only took the Elder Wand to protect others, but not to rule, and that would be a nod to Rowling, 4) if he knows the wards have been tempered with, then it is at least weak evidence that Voldemort (or whoever in the castle can speak to snakes and has the Crown) has bluffed and the Stone, after a while, can be returned to Perenelle...
Dumbledore, unlike Flamel, may not fully believe Voldemort can really use the Crown to find the Stone. Otherwise why would Dumbledore ask Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts - does he really care more about the safety of a few students than about Voldemort getting the Stone? If so, he could prepare alternative traps, just on the chance he is right.
Also, whatever he believes, there's no reason for him to mark the true location of the Stone with corridors to which he directs the Gryffindor students. That just increases the chances that Voldemort will use the students to get at the Stone, or will encounter some of them while there, and harm them. Why would Dumbledore not separate the Stone's guardroom from his challenge to the students, unless he doesn't think Voldemort can locate the stone, and is using the students' forbidden corridor to lure Voldemort into a trap?
He arranged for the Stone to be in Hogwarts. Whether it's at the end of that particular series of traps is not entirely certain. I'm sure someone like Moody would point out the flaws inherent in a system that students can penetrate. Why not just stick it in the Room of Requirement or some hidden room that only the Headmaster can access (and use proper security)?
Because then (from Flamel's perspective) the Dark Lord would use the Crown of the Serpent and find that the Stone was not, in fact, at the end of the dungeon crawl, which would then nullify the purpose of the trap: to lure the Dark Lord there. (Presumably the Dark Lord would see no point in traipsing past all of those obstacles if the Stone wasn't there.)
Flamel would then insist upon the Stone being placed under Dumbledore's "best protections", meaning... huh. Is this series of obstacles really the best Dumbledore can do? For that matter, if Flamel taught Dumbledore so much of his powerful magic, presumably he/she knows much more powerful magic ("more" in terms of quantity, at least--not necessarily strength) that he/she hasn't seen fit to teach yet. Why not just protect the Stone himself?
Certainly if Dumbledore & Flamel knew that the Crown stuff was a bluff, they could put it elsewhere in Hogwarts. But they don't. Why build an elaborate trap for an enemy who (you believe) will follow the scent to somewhere else entirely ("the Stone wherever it was hidden")?
But why endanger the students by challenging them with a Forbidden Corridor that happens to be the place Voldemort is going to attack?
To have a public reason for a dungeon crawl inside your school. When you multiply it over, the danger posed by Voldemort is not enhanced that much by this move.
He didn't announce the Stone as a public reason for the Forbidden Corridor.
He doesn't need a reason for a dungeon crawl in Hogwarts because that's the kind of thing Dumbledore would do. He does need a reason for a series of actually off-limits deadly traps.
What he needs a reason for is putting the dungeon drawl in the same place as the deadly traps.
If he puts a dungeon crawl in another place than deadly traps, he needs to publically justify deadly traps, (and he would have put in a dungeon crawl without reason - remember that (at least) most insane things he does have a hidden reason). If he puts the dungeon crawl in the same place as the deadly traps, he can claim the latter to be part of the former, and it would stay "a thing that Dumbledore does", so long as nobody actually dies.
Quirrel says:
That seems very important, so why didn't he ask any of them why they arrived early? It looks like a blatant mistake on his part.
I agree -- this is central to figuring out the next few chapters. My best guess is that Harry said "Hello, Voldemort" so that an invisible Cedric Diggory could overhear. Diggory could time-turn one hour back to tell Dumbledore at 5:55 or so, or, alternatively, could inform Dumbledore after 6:55. Dumbledore himself has a time-turner, so as long as Diggory gave no information from after 7:00 Dumbldore could travel back 6 hours from then. Dumbledore knows that Harry is Riddle, so he probably has some aces up his sleeve.
Ch. 79 After the aurors come get Hermione for the attempted murder of Draco, Harry is in the Headmaster's office:
After a lengthy discussion of the case, Harry leaves:
But there is no reason to believe he left Hogwarts. Dumbledore then retrieves the Weasley twins from Divination class and gets their map:
I'd previously assumed that no information came of this, because the Defense Professor was being detained at the DMLE at the time, but Dumbledore almost certainly saw the map report Harry as Tom Riddle.
What did he conclude from this, I wonder?
That Harry is a horcrux, and then ...?
Has it been previously established that no lying can take place when using parseltongue or is Harry's belief in this based solely on his inability to lie to Quirrell?
His belief is based on Quirrell telling him and on his inability.
Muggle research in the 2010s has revealed much about what actually makes people happy, and how often people are deceived. The best way to find out is with one of those mood-tracking cell phone apps, which eliminate the biases of memory. Quirrell doesn't have that, but as an approximation, I searched the PDF for the word "smile", which appears 310 times in chapters 1-106, and the word "enjoy", which appears 32 times. What did I find?
Interacting with Harry makes Quirrell happy. Moreso than killing idiots. Moreso than teaching Battle Magic. Killing him would be a grave mistake.
The book is mostly from Harry's perspective, so I would expect some selection bias in searching for interactions that make Quirrell happy, since most of the interactions described are with Harry as the protagonist. I agree with your conclusion though.
That quote is from chapter 74. I mention this because you didn't specify and to save the trouble for others to search.
Too bad the 2010s haven't happened yet.
We haven't seen him kill idiots, so we don't know how happy that makes him.
From his perspective, Firenze would have been an idiot, and killing him didn't result in any visible sign of happiness.
Eh, Firenze was taking initiative to dispose of a major problem even if it required actions he considered morally distasteful. Compared to Quirrell, he's pretty dumb, but he hasn't distinguished himself for idiocy the way, say, the Ministry official who took self-destructive joy in obstructing him did. If anything, he probably distinguished himself as cleverer than the norm, if not in any way a peer.
On the other hand, Firenze's mistake was going into self-indulgent rambling instead of just killing the person he wanted to kill (especially with the stakes apparently as high as the survival of the universe). I get the feeling that Voldemort, who had his own Evil Overlord List, would find this particularly distasteful.
Well, given his actions in the past he can hardly call this idiocy worthy of being killed. Also, Firenze was not annoying him by being an idiot, he was annoying him by threatening Harry, for whom he had other plans.
As far as I understand, Quirrell believes (or claims to believe) that killing Harry will put him one step closer to fulfilling his CEV. Thus, any amusement Harry could provide is to Quirrel kind of like as ice cream is to us mortals: a minor, fleeting, and ultimately inconsequential pleasure.
I wouldn't extrapolate that research onto someone who is capable of murder and torture. I'm not sure though, and this is an interesting point - does everyone derive happiness from altruism?
Morfin is a Riddle family name, so we can probably rule out Eliezer choosing it for its anagrams. Nevertheless, might as well have some fun:
Tom Morfin Riddle
What else?
Firm dildo mentor
Norm Modifier, Ltd.
Dim dolt informer
Find old Mortimer
Doom mind trifler
I'm Milton Redford
I'm Milford rodent
Florid Tinder mom
And, ultimately ...
Lord Tim, [the] Informed
"There are some who call me ... Tim."
On Reddit, Eliezer endorsed these:
Always the one you least expect...
Maybe it was a horcrux.
Terraforming tool?
Not that dissimilar to what set up the confrontation in the hallway...
I wonder if he's just getting a new name for arbitrary reasons (like HPJEV, Bellatrix, etc.), for just this sort of anagram fun, or for some story-related significance to his mother naming him after her brother instead of her father?
Her maiden canon name is Black, not completely arbitrary.
Bella wasn't entirely arbitrary, it was to set up a joke when Harry thought Quirrel was talking about Sirius.
I just read up to the point in chapter 108 where Voldemort refuses to answer the question about the immortality spell (and haven't read the comments here yet.) It occurred to me immediately that since this is question about the past -- assuming Voldemort has already cast the spell -- that he has broken his agreement, which means that Harry can now start executing plans to overcome him, and say "No" without lying when Voldemort asks if he has betrayed him.
I must say, the thought of Voldie kicking himself (well, wanting to, but he couldn't because no legs) while spending nine years as a disembodied spirit in the Voyager Plaque was extremely amusing.
I also loved the fact that his Voldemort persona was designed to be a stupid Dark Lord that would last weeks at most and ended up being way too strong for Magical Britain.
One of my favorite bits:
One wonders how Lucius Malfoy, and Draco, will react to hearing all of this.
... Huh.
The power that the Dark Lord knows not... might end up being love after all.
Crazy theory: Voldy resurrects Hermione to keep his promise, then kills Harry. Hermione then drops Voldy somehow, and resurrects Harry using the same means that were used on her.
Additional crazy theory: The method for doing both will be the Philosopher's Stone. She will transmute Voldemort into something mortal-but-inert - a bristlecone pine, perhaps.
Or through different means. You might be able to brew a Harry resurrection potion with forcibly drawn Thestral blood, Hermione's body, and unknowingly bequeathed bones of a Potter, Slytherin heir, or Peverell.
Fine tuning: She will transmute Voldermort's spirit into something inert (since he is free to leave his body otherwise).
I wonder if the final room is not visible on the Marauder's Map because it's warded or because the room you enter is determined by whether/how the potion is flawed.
As a veteran Potion's professor, Snape would be able to predict very accurately the way a first year would screw up such a fiddly task. Screw it up in the right way, see an innocuous final room with a little "Well done, don't spoil it!" from the Headmaster. Execute it perfectly and trigger... what exactly?
This seems like a good occasion to quote the twist reveal in Orson Scott Card's Dogwalker:
That is delightful.
So by the way, has anyone notice that Eliezer did something even more impossible? Not only was Harry saved from certain death at the hands of a hoard of Yaoi fangirls by Voldemort and it wasn't crack, but Voldemort was the one who responsible for the whole thing and it still isn't crack.
You probably mean a horde of Yaoi fangirls, but Harry would be wise indeed to hoard them, until he hits puberty.
So far the update schedule seems to follow the Fibonacci sequence.
I sincerely hope that pattern doesn't stick.
The hourly countdown seems likely, though.
If the pattern continues then it is impossible for the posting to end on "pi day", the 14th of March.
Further bonus trivia: 108 is the number of worldly sins according to Buddhism. Given that this is heavily referenced in anime and manga, which Eliezer enjoys, the fact that it's the chapter in which Voldemort's backstory is revealed is unlikely to be coincidental.
Aaaaand there were 107 horcruxes (meaning 107 murders) before he stopped keeping count.
I think it is highly likely to be coincidental :P
A year and a half ago, I predicted on this basis that there would be 108 chapters total.
I was wrong, but another piece of evidence against coincidence is that the lower bound on horcruxes makes for the second instance of 107 in Eliezer's fiction. The first is here, as follows:
Voldemort making random rocks into horcruxs? One day someone steps on the wrong rock and turns into LORD VOLDEMORT! I hate it when that happens.
It's worse than that. What's something you're likely to have on hand at all times, and worse, are then likely to hand off to someone other person, who will hand it off to another, and so on and so forth?
Even if wizarding currency is protected against such shenanigans, some unknown number of UK sterling could have fractions of Voldemort's soul in them.
Clever idea, but currency doesn't stay long in circulation. Coins longer than bills -- the oldest bill in my wallet is from 2006, while I found a quarter from 1976 in my pocket. And if horcruces are as hard to destroy here as they are in canon, I imagine even Muggles would find it curious if a 50p coin were found intact after it should have been melted down.
I suppose it'd work if you're planning to keep supplies up on an ongoing basis and didn't think much of Muggle investigative abilities or their ability to interface with wizarding authorities, though -- and the latter does seem minimal in this universe.
How about the doorknob on the men's room in St. Paul's Cathedral? Or some other building you wouldn't expect to go away for a while. Or, heh, the Blarney Stone, if you can find enough time alone with it.
Both are withdrawn from circulation as they decay, and if they don't decay they'll stick around for a while. As it gets old enough, it'll get picked up by a collector of some sort, who will keep it better-preserved and think nothing of its long lifespan. (This does, however, limit the amount of possessing it can do)
Better idea: Door handles.
The great Lord Voldemort, foiled by interior redecorating.
Also, I read the original Horcrux restriction, not as "someone has to be close at the time," but as "anyone who has ever touched the Horcrux." Otherwise the original would be even more useless, since it'd be very likely to discharge while you were still alive.
I was thinking wedding rings. One of the few things that rarely leaves a person. Or some wizarding-equivalent of a heart valve, something kept inside the body.
I was thinking a door handle, or a hand rail in a busy area.
Yeah the new version stills work by imprinting his brain state on to a victim. He just link the ghost and victims together so that they stay updated. Hence he can see space from the plague. The resurrection stone allows the ghost in the objects to move on their own and possess people without them touching them.
META: I'd like to suggest having a separate thread for each publication. These attract far more interest than any other threads, and after the first 24 hours the top comments are set and there's little new discussion.
There aren't very many threads posted in discussion these days, so it's not like there is other good content that will be crowded out by one new thread every 1-3 days.
You can change the comment sort to "new" instead of "top", below the tags at the bottom of the original post.
When the Dumbledore sees himself on the Map in chapter 79, it initials his middle names:
But when it shows the Tom Riddles, it doesn't include the middle initial M.
This is probably just an oversight.
Is Quirrel aware of all the people whom he can possess via his True Horcruxes? Can he possess any one of them at will, without the original body dying?
This may explain the fact that he occasionally leaves his host body. We thought it was to inhabit his other horcruxes, particularly the Voyager one, but it may be to possess other people.
ETA: apparently the answer is yes:
He's made it pretty clear that he can abandon his current body without needing to wait for it to die, but it's not clear whether he's able to temporarily leave and return. It might be that leaving the body would mean simply letting it die. Whether he can or not, that's probably not what he's doing whenever he's in "off" mode, because he's been doing that since before Harry revealed to him the identity of the Resurrection Stone.
I will point out, one per 500 comments was the old system. There was ~30 threads for the first ~100 chapters.
Note that this poll only samples people who care about these threads enough to read them. People who avoid these threads and don't like them cluttering /discussion will not see it.
Fair point, though I feel like that logic is sort of letting them cause a comparatively large disruption to our enjoyment of real-time discussion of the final arc of a fiction we've been following for years, in return for the prevention of a comparatively small temporary disruption to their enjoyment of the Discussion forum. Scope, of course, plays a part here, but I doubt it's remotely enough on the side of the 500 comments people to tip the scales.
The solution seems obvious (albeit hard and dangerous): make the students smarter so they are no longer idiots.
Another solution would have been for him to have children, since intelligence is highly heritable. Unfortunately, now that his original body is dead, this may not work.
Possible stupid question:If Quirrell was so frustrated with with the idiocy of the students, then why did he kill Hermione (the next smartest student) in an unnecessary subplot (Quirrell admitted it did not matter in the long run whether the plan succeeded or not) and cause the next smartest one after that to be withdrawn from the school?
That's not one of the plans listed as unimportant. The relevant part was removing or weakening her influence on Harry, and this was achieved by the Troll plan when the original plan failed.
I suppose that it's partly because she wasn't nearly smart enough for Quirrell to find interesting in the way Harry is.
Once he's achieved immortality, he can do both at once. By killing idiots, he'll improve the gene pool, and eventually the children will stop being idiots. Then he can become a teacher.
That was absolutely awesome. This story is really very well written. So much exposition, and it just all made perfect sense. And it was even somehow brought back far more in line with the original novel than I thought possible.
And I guess the '"Power the dark lord knows not" really is love, which is kinda awesome.
It's still kind of obvious how to defeat Voldemort though. Simply permanently disable him without killing him. Some magical prison, or a coma, or a permanent transfiguration into a stone. This is in fact so obvious that Voldemort himself should realize it as well. Maybe he just figures he is so far above Harry's power level that he has nothing to fear. Or he has some defenses against even this.
Another way to get rid of him: Destroy all his horcruxes on earth, then kill him. He'll live on on pioneer, but that's fine. You can pick him up again in 10000 years when humanity has progressed far beyond him, and can probably even cure him. Heck that'd even be a nice ending. A epilogue set 10,000 years from now, with Harry recovering the Pioneer 11 and curing Voldemort.
The sequel could then be a Harry / Voldemort slashfic where Harry and a redeemed Voldemort rule the galaxy as father and son.
It seems like he can leave the body at will to go to another... I don't think permanently disabling would help.
The details seem like they would matter here. If he's transfigured into a rock, as far as we know he would not be conscious and experiencing anything, so how could he 'will' to go to another body?
Conversely, you could ask: if he can't be conscious or experience anything in his current "body", doesn't that mean it's dead for purposes of the Horcrux spell, and he is automatically shunted to another horcrux?
I don't think we know enough details to be sure what would happen.
An allusion to the Passover ceremony? Why???
Passover is the reenactment of a ritual, powered by blood, to ward off the Angel of Death.
Eliezer's reason: Because it's funny (and maaaaybe, as others have said, because Passover is all about saving people from death by means of a ritual involving blood). Harry's reason: Maybe the thought just occurred to him.
...which would probably be out of character for Harry -- how likely is it that an eleven-year-old with WASP-sounding parents would spontaneously think of a line from a Jewish ritual? -- but, oh well, know your audience.
Unless he has some of Voldemort's knowledge stored up in that dark side of his? He's traveled pretty far and he's interested in the sorts of things that would lead him to read up on both the social technologies of religions and the cultures of the Muggle superpowers, so he'd be more likely than Harry to get it.
But it's probably just a throwaway reference.
It is not uncommon for jews to invite goyim to Seders. And if a child is at a seder, it is their role to ask this question.
It's probably the single most famous line from a Jewish ritual that there is. But yeah, I agree it's a bit implausible for Harry to recognize it. I certainly wouldn't have at his age, though I wasn't as precocious as him.
(Much earlier in HPMOR, McGonagall is shown to know the Hebrew word for "gold" while Harry doesn't. Make of that what you will. Oh, and in Harry's year in Ravenclaw there is one "Anthony Goldstein (out of a certain tiny ethnic group that won 25% of the Nobel Prizes)".)
Where?
Oh, I see. I just didn't have the context to recognize that. Thanks.
I get what is meant, but if they had been lovers for some time then I would say that Perenelle was not a virgin in any meaningful sense of the word. Of course, from an old-fashioned point of view she might have been, but this sentence is not accompanied by a modifier expressing the change in values as the next one is.
Let us recall that this story takes place in the 90s and that Tom Riddle attended Hogwarts in the 40s. I don't think that his views on sexual politics are entirely consistent with those of the present-day, so he may view "virgin" as meaning "not penetrated by a man".
Then again Eliezer has been imposing modern sexual attitudes on the Wizarding World, whether out of ignorance or a desire to be politically correct I'm not sure. In any case, I find it one of the most jarring aspects of the fic.
Not just modern sexual attitudes, but specifically the sexual attitudes you see in the Harry Potter fanfiction community. And I'm sure it was meant to be jarring. Magical Britain's culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.
The jarring thing is precisely that it isn't. The sexual attitudes of the fanfiction community have a lot more in common with general contemporary western post-protestant sexual attitudes then with the sexual attitudes of any other (contemporary or historical) culture.
Romeo and Juliet, the Star-Crossed Lovers (so called by Shakespeare), never had sex. So the words were used as Quirrel describes, six centuries ago.
They have sex before Act III Scene 5.
*shrug* Maybe Perenelle didn't exercise much and still had an intact hymen. There's your drop of blood.
So who was Alexander Chernyshov? Wikipedia says:
This doesn't seem particularly relevant, and also he died while Tom Riddle was a young boy. But it's a common name (as Google tells me). Did anyone catch the reference?
I'd just assumed it was a cameo.
Confirmed.
Though Harry was careful not to touch Quirrell's snake form in Azkaban, this quote implies to me that Animagus forms might be more resistant to the Riddles Doom effect. This might apply to Harry as well, should he ever be in his Animagus form.
Rituals require sacrifice. Conceivably, Riddle sacrificed his ability to love, or to care about others.
They require a sacrifice each time they're cast, and Riddle can't sacrifice his ability to love every time. The sacrifice the "new horcrux" ritual calls for is most likely a human sacrifice, meaning whoever you've murdered in order to create it.
Is Snape being mind-controlled or truly in league with Quirrel (or pretending to be)?
From Ch. 77, Quirrell confronts Snape in a discussion that touches on Snape's loyalties and the 3rd floor corridor. It ends with this:
Snape in canon is one hell of an occlumens. When Sprout is being controlled by Quirrel, she is described as blank-eyed:
Ch. 104:
Ch. 105:
Snape seems normal: Ch. 105:
Ch. 106: